Stockton North MP Alex Cunningham wins vote for Parliamentary Beard of the Year
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Stockton North MP Alex Cunningham has won the vote for Parliamentary Beard of the Year. He shaved the 2022 winner Jeremy Corbyn, winning 56.2% of votes cast to 34.8% for the Islington North MP
Mr Cunningham and his Stockton North Constituency have been the subject of abuse from Home Secretary James Cleverley. Mr Cleverley’s exclusion from the 2023 shortlist was confirmed following a vote of BLF supporters.
The annual award is not based on MP’s political affiliations but how much of a positive public image their beard has brought to Parliamentary politics during the year.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, James Cleverley has brought the hirsute into disrepute and Alex Cunningham’s victory in voting for Parliamentary Beard of the Year is clearly a positive response to that. We congratulate him and hope he continues to exert Parliamentary Beard Power.
50 years ago at Christmas 1973 Tory Industry Minister John Davies told his family to enjoy Christmas because ‘it may be our last’. Davies was looking at a situation where a miners overtime ban had led to a three day working week and power cuts. At the time the Six Day War earlier in the year between Eqypt and Israel had led to a significant increase in oil prices. Davies’s statement was about the possibility that capitalism would not last.
Fast forward to 2023 and while the Tories are focused on a Rwanda Culture War, Britain is close to recession, a cost of living crisis focused on energy costs, food prices and mortgages remains significant and the country is involved in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
E P Thompson’s Writing by Candlelight (1980) revisited. Times letter writers on the COVID Inquiry (Dec 11th) What was the ‘overall cost benefit’?
The late socialist historian E P Thompson (1924-1993) was an enthusiast for letter writing. He wrote many himself although most unfortunately are locked away in the Bodleian for the time being.
He researched the history of aspects of letter writing, along with his researcher E E Dodds, and one result was his essay The Crime of Anonymity which has considerable relevance in 2023 although it was about the first decades of the nineteenth century. It looks at the writing of anonymous letters as threats- often to the rich and powerful-and official efforts to track down and punish the writers. The parallel with social media is considerable.
Thompson also wrote letters to the papers and was entertained particularly by the reactionary nature of some letter writers to The Times.
He would certainly have found at least one of those in The Times (11th December) to be of interest. The writer opined that while the COVID Inquiry had focused on the shortcomings of politicians the real issue was whether Lockdowns were appropriate or not. They felt a cost benefit analysis is required. Of course Lockdowns saved lives but at what cost to the economy and profit? There was also certainly an impact on the social fabric of society from the NHS to education but this had already been significantly damaged by ten years of austerity politics in 2020(the letter writer doesn’t mention this)
Times letter writers have now had their say on the COVID Inquiery. They are at root, in the main though not exclusively, reactionary of course. E P Thompson I sense would have been interested…
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal netwok of beard wearers, has backed Defence Secretary Grant Shapps who has called for the ban on beards in the Army to be lifted.
The ban which applies to nearly all ranks in the Army was introduced after the Crimean War in the 1850s.
Shapps is reported in the Times (12th December) as noting that Armies in other countries function effectively with beards and the British Army’s ban is proving a bar to recruitment.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, since both the Navy and RAF allow beards it seems entirely sensible to allow it in the Army too. Their should be no room for prejudice against facial hair in 2023
On 22nd December GB News was claiming that the Church of England was ordering the words of carols to be changed. Like much that appears on Reform UK Ltd’s PR channel this claim was unevidenced. It also underlined a completely unsurprising lack of knowledge of British history
The association of carols with the Church and with authorised words and tunes is no older than Victorian times at best. Historically carols came from an oral tradition where there were no agreed words and often no tune at all.
In Scotland where they were attempts to ban the celebration of Christmas on religious grounds in the final quarter of the sixteenth century the singing of carols was associated with fornication. ‘Profane pastimes’ such as ‘footballing, the singing of carols and other profane songs and dancing’ was forbidden, although not always successfully.
Its also the season of the Lords of Misrule, who turned the world upside down. A tradition there was to sing carols outside the houses of better off people until a donation was made…
Is it the end for the Tories or will they morph into a hard right Faragist Party
On 12th December Rishi Sunak won a Parliamentary vote to give his latest plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda a reading. It will go into Committee and further readings in the New Year. That will disappoint Suella Braverman who in a recent rant demanded Parliament sit on Christmas Day to make the Bill law.
No Tories voted against Sunak although some abstained. However GBNews, a source of entirely unreliable information, claimed that 5 different groups of hard right rabble Tory MPs could muster up to 100 in number
The crisis in the Tory Party which has seen Johnson and Truss depart is intensifying
During the summer 2023 recess the Tories ran a series of weekly campaigns on issues like asylum seekers and crime. All ended up causing at least as many problems for the Tories as they did for the opposition.
The Tories remain around 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly split. Nadine Dorries resignation letter to Sunak was partly farcical but partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.
Meanwhile former Home Secretary Suella Braverman on the hard right of the Tories has renewed calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
In 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book arguing that the Tory Party had reached the end of its historic existence. As the years since 2010 have unfortunately demonstrated he was wrong. However in a recent Guardian article he has returned to the point, arguably more persuasively.
The Tories as a party representing ruling class interests have been ‘shapeshifters’ pragmatically shifting positions and policies to fit the demands of the moment. So the Tories resisted demands for an extension to the vote with force at Peterloo in 1819 and in Parliament with the 1832 Reform Act. However in 1867 they passed a further Act extending the suffrage.
Likewise they were the party of the landed aristocracy but in 1846/7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class. In much more recent times Tory leader Edward Heath took Britain into was is now the EU in the early 1970s. 50 years on the Tories are focused on Brexit and staying out of the EU.
The problem they have is that beyond making money for their mates and sometimes themselves they no longer have a coherent view of what ruling class politics which can also win elections is. There have been five Tory leaders since 2015 each seemingly more incompetent than the last.
Boris Johnson personifies the crisis. He was not a supporter of Brexit and notoriously only became so not out of some great principle or understanding of ruling class interests but because it served his personal ambition to be Prime Minister.
However I don’t agree with Wheatcroft that it is certain that the Tory Party is finished as an absolute certainty.
There are several factors which might see it survive in some form.
The first is Labour. Despite huge majorities in 1997 and 2001 Blair while tinkering with reforms determined that his real focus was illegal wars. Then in the financial crash of 2008 Gordon Brown decided that the key thing was to save the market economy and in doing so ushered in an era of austerity. Unsurprisingly Labour votes declined significantly and the Tories who had looked finished made a return
Starmer of course has his own variant on this. If the Tories are busy making themselves redundant then perhaps the way forward is to move Labour into that space. His own version of the Great Moving Right Show. So hapless are the Tories at the moment that this strategy might work, if only briefly.
The Tories however might shapeshift again and move themselves further to the right still, around the racist politics of Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson and others. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party while a minority have the capacity perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping.
There is scope for a political reconfiguration on the hard right mirroring developments across the rest of Europe. Opposing it rather than joining in the Great Moving Right Show is essential.
There is speculation that after an election defeat Farage could emerge as the leader of a reconstituted hard to far right Tory Party. Perhaps but that would also mean the end of the existing Tory Party with various strands of ruling class strategies within it
Rishi Sunak invited members of the Tories Parliamentary Party’s hard and far right groupuscules for a breakfast meeting on Tuesday morning. It was to try and persaude them to be very slightly less racist about Sunak’s Rwanda scheme (latest version).
There had been speculation about what breakfast might consist. The suggestion of smoked salmon was dismissed as too Labour. An informal poll I ran found toast to be the most popular suggestion.
The BBC has reported that in reality bacon rolls were served (tomato or brown sauce optional). There does not appear to have been a vegetarian or vegan option which no doubt the MPs would have dismissed as Woke anyway. Jonathan Gullis was present so presumably he chewed the carpet instead.
The tradition of sandwiches at No.10 to try and resolve difficult issues goes back (at least) to the days of Harold Wilson’s Premiership in the 1960s (1964-1970). In 1966 he invited union leaders to No.10 with the aim of trying to resolve a seaman’s strike. Beer and sandwiches were on offer.
If any alcohol was on offer at Downing St today given the attendees it would presumably have been the Churchillian tipple of brandy
Four Years On: Measuring Labour’s Vote on 12th December 2019
Labour suffered a significant Electoral defeat on 12th December 2019 while the Tories achieved a large majority, their first for three decades.
Keir Starmer’s constant refrain is that Labour has changed. Indeed thousands of members have left and the Party has lurched rightwards. Polls suggest that Labour will win a General Election mainly it might be ventured because the Tories are a chaotic disaster and Starmer is not in the frame for that.
The media, which at best, is not great when it comes to history often notes that the 203 seats won was the lowest total since 1935. Of course there are always other figures. One is that Labour now has the largest number of female MPs in Parliamentary history.
One interesting measure is the total number of votes cast for Labour. This (fairly obviously) is not a guarantee of Electoral success, particularly with a first past the post system, but it does in a very broad way reflect a class vote and the depth of a Party’s support.
Here Labour’s 10.3 million was well down on what Corbyn achieved in 2017 but beyond that the second highest Labour total since 2001, Tony Blair’s 2nd Election victory.
Starmer’s references to the 2019 Election, in which he played a key role, may be seen as political theatre, even if he is not exactly the best actor. The reality is however that away from Westminster in workplaces and communities support needs to be engaged not just to win Elections but to provide a basis for a Labour Government in Office. Even Labour’s focus groups underline there is a lot to do here and present Labour positions across a range of issues are not helping.
Historians back Gary Lineker’s comments on Rwanda Bill
The London Socialist Historians Group, which organises the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, has backed Gary Lineker’s comments on the Government’s latest Rwanda Bill.
While Lineker’s opposition along with that of many others has faced criticism from the Tory right, placing the Bill in a historical context is important say the historians.
The criticism has continued with the incoming BBC Chair, Samir Shah- a Tory appointment- opining to a Parliamentary Committee that he thought some of Lineker’s comments had broken the BBC’s latest social media policy. He did however note, a point entirely lost on other critics, that Lineker as a presenter of football programmes has rather more flexibility to remark on issues which he does not cover for the BBC
One of the other critics, inevitably, was the Murdoch owned Times (14th December Editorial) which has remarked that if Lineker won’t stick to its interpetation of the guidelines he should get a job with a ‘private broadcaster’. Mr Murdoch owns several…
The late socialist historian E P Thompson (Peculiarities of the English,1965) made the point about refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere and the positive impact they have had on British life
Here is this island, and there, across a few wet miles, are Other Countries. Those waters have, on occasion, been crossed. That city, London, is not in the Antarctic but has been, alongside Paris, Vienna and Prague, a great European capital. In its East End there have been deposit after deposit of refugee and immigrant workers. In the universities there have been deposit after deposit of émigré intellectuals. Across that water there came, in the 1930s, wave after wave of refugees from Fascism; across that water there went, in the early 1940s, wave after wave of troops to assist in the liberation of Southern and Western Europe; and across that water there came, in the later 1940s and 1950s, a further wave of refugees from Eastern Europe.
LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett said, Gary Lineker has again put himself on the line to support a sensible and safe policy on refugees We are supporting the central London protest on International Migrants Day on the 18th December because while remembering history is vital so also is taking part in making the future.
Beard Liberation Front rules on Currys Ad: a beard does not guarantee wisdom
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that a current TV ad for Currys creates a misleading impression of the hirsute.
In the add actors playing Currys workers wear false beards with the narrative that facial hair creates wisdom. The aim of the ad is clearly to plant the thought that reliable advice can be obtained from Currys staff.
The Beard Liberation Front says that while there is no particular reason to doubt advice given in Currys outlets, it is a mistake to equate beards automatically with wisdom. There are unfortunately plenty of examples of beard wearers who entirely lack wisdom.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the ad is entertaining, for beard wearers at least, and of course has attracted complaints from pogonophobes. Ultimately however while we promote Beard Power not every beard wearer has it.
